Shade
by Havoc
Summary: Spike, back from his quest, finds Buffy waiting in his crypt... Finally finished!
1. Loitering in the Houses of the Dead

Shade: Loitering in the Houses of the Dead

lyrics from "Bother" by Corey Taylor  
_  
Wish I was  
Too dead to cry  
My self-reflection fades  
Stones to throw at my creator  
Masochist to which I cater_

Without Spike, the crypt was empty. It didn't matter that Clem, foolish, good-natured, considerate Clem, Clem the anti-Spike, stayed there now- he only occupied space, only floated aimlessly in the void left by Spike's abrupt departure. No, without Spike, the place was shadow of itself, a dark grave good for nothing but hiding memories that can't stand to be looked at too closely. Spike had been gone weeks now, gone without a goodbye, without a backwards glance, without an explanation. Or maybe the explanation was all too easy to figure out; the bruises on her body were only just fading, the ones in her mind and memory would be there forever. After all, when had the two of them ever needed words anyway? They had done all their talking with their fists or, in more gentle moments, their fingers. Buffy figured that all she needed to do was to look in the mirror if she wanted to know why Spike had left.

And still she came here anyway. No matter what else could be said about Spike, and a lot could be said, very little of it good, he had been a constant in her life. Those were few and far between now, even if they were barely more than enemies, even when they shared a bed. But he had known her in high school, and he had been there when she died, and he was there when she came back, trailing grave dirt behind her like some sort of morbid veil. How many people could she say the same of? It was him and the Scoobies. Just 'cause a person figured they hated another person didn't mean that they didn't feel the loss when the other left. And if she really wanted to convince herself there was no way she could love Spike, she ought to be trying to hate him less. Apathy was the opposite of love- hate was just its darker twin. She really should stop coming to his crypt. There was something seriously wrong with her that she was here again, for no reason, just to stand in the shadows.

The sun never reached its fingers into the crypt; it stayed outside in the real world, where it belonged. This was a place beyond nature, beyond understanding, a place where light shouldn't come, a place where shadows ruled. Whatever strange darkness her affair with Spike had been born into, it had its roots here, hardly the classic trappings of romance. There was where the shrine had been, alter to his obsession, and there was the place he had tied her, ready to swear his love for her in Dru's blood. There was the place she had first kissed him, the first and maybe last kindness she had ever shown him, when he had let himself be tortured rather than give Dawn up. There was the wall she had thrown him against, when she snuck in, a ghost of herself, so hungry for his taste she couldn't stop even with Xander watching. That was the bar he had been standing by, when he threw her out for not loving him, for only taking him when it was easy, when she could lie. That was the grave they were on when Riley walked in on them, part of her cheering that here at least was one person she wouldn't need to lie to. And Spike was standing right there when she left him, left him looking lost and confused as she walked out the door with finality she had never shown before. Strange kind of an affair, that marks its milestones in pain and not pleasure. Spike had been her punishment, never her pleasure, or so she told herself, even when she ached for his touch. Spike had been purgatory, managing to be both heaven and hell when he was neither.

"Where did you go?" Buffy asked into the silence, into the dark. She did not miss him. What was there to miss? The pain, the bruises, sex against alley walls as she died her slow death in Doublemeat Palace? Insults when she wanted softness, kindness when she wanted a fight, Spike's endless look of confusion when she couldn't love him like he loved her? Obsessively, destructively? Fuck this. She didn't even know why she had come here, she didn't know why she cared where he went or why. So he was gone, saved her the dust of killing him.

"Love?"

No way. No way. Buffy spun around, shocked, scared, not alone. A familiar figure stood in the darkest shadows against the back wall, wrapped in his own darkness. How long had he been there? How long had he been hiding? She hadn't even seen him there, watching her make a fool out of herself. "Spike?"

He stepped forward, body a perfect picture of pain, bruised, bloody, scarred. "In a manner of speaking." There was something different about his voice, about his eyes, about his walk. She couldn't pinpoint it, maybe it was the limp, or a voice worn thing with screams. But if anybody ought to know that pain alone didn't leave marks that deep, it was her. It was more than pain that had changed him. It was something stronger.

Buffy strived for sarcasm. "Gee, Spike, I thought you wanted me to be the only person to beat you."

He ignored it, like he had been ignoring her a lot lately. "When you came back, and everything was the same except for you, was it like hell?" His words held a sort of shell-shocked curiosity, like he wanted to care about her answer, but couldn't really bring himself to believe it.

Strange question. But he had listened to her when she couldn't tell the truth to anyone else, and for that alone if nothing else, maybe she owed him. She stepped closer, still out of range, but not so far. "Yeah. Yeah, it was... what did you try to change Spike?" The differences were all strangely familiar, an echo of something from her past. She stared at him, trying to figure out what about him now reminded her of anyone else, when Spike had always been purely unique in her mind.

He turned away, stared at the door, looked anywhere but at her. "I went to this demon, dark as they come, wanted him to make me what I was. Wanted him to burn the love out of me, wanted him to rip this sodding chip out. Wanted him to make me a monster. Instead, he tried to make me a man." He laughed, a hollow sound that sent chills down her spine.

"What?"

He spun to look at her dead on, and she saw his eyes under black and blue, saw something familiar hiding in their depths. Not Spike-familiar. Older. "What did you do, Spike?" If that was fear in her voice, she was going to have to kick her own ass. What did she care what Spike did to himself?

"Didn't ask the right question. Said I wanted to be what I was. Damn demon gave me back my soul. I guess, figuring it's not real likely I'm gonna die soon, I get my hell on Earth." There was a thread of bitterness in his voice, woven through the words like a poison in a river.

And that was where she had seen the look before. In Angel's eyes. The eyes of something that knows damn good and well what it has done with its life. He had a man's eyes in his demon's face. Buffy felt like the world was spinning out from under her, spinning away. She felt like she was all alone with Spike, lost in a swirl of confusion, lost in his confession. "What have you done, Spike?"

He tried his old leer on for size, failed miserably, lost it in a grimace of pain. "So, what'dye think, pet? Could you love me now? Now that I'm just like your fucking precious Angel?"

She knew there were about a million things she could do in response to that, starting with killing him for not wanting to take no for an answer and ending with saying yes, like she was as mad as Dru, some strange reversal of fortune. Instead, she took the simple route, the easiest road. She ran, out of the crypt, out of the darkness, and into the light. And it might have been a trick of her imagination, but she could have sworn that she heard Spike's laughter, tinged now with madness, trail after her.

He had his soul back... what the hell should she do now?

_You don't need to bother  
I don't need to be  
I'll keep slipping farther  
Once I hold on  
I won't let go till it bleeds._

To Be Continued...


	2. Where the Sun Can't Find You

Shade: Where the Sun Can't Find You  
_  
Wish I was  
Too dead to care  
If indeed I cared at all  
Never had a voice to protest  
So you feed me to judges_

Buffy was still running when she hit the streets on the outskirts of the cemetery, quiet, haunted by the memories of a thousand fights, of wars that were beyond the imaginations of the people who lived in the silent, shadowed houses across from the cemetery gates. People in other towns always say that the dead make good neighbors; nobody in the Sunnydale is that stupid. In this neighborhood, the doors get locked at sunset and people, so used to lying to themselves about their own motives, settle down for another exciting night of T.V. and tell themselves it's not they're too scared to go out, it's just that they're not interested. Even in the daytime, the streets are deserted; this is not a place anyone wants to linger. Deep inside themselves, everyone knew the truth about Sunnydale, Sunny Hell. They just worked in the theory that if you never speak something's name, it will never notice that you're there. Sunnydale's curse was silence. If anyone saw Buffy's dash through the shade-shrouded streets and avenues, they kept it to themselves. Sunnydale is used to its secrets, and if anyone recognized the Slayer as she pounded past their home, tears on her face, they didn't say anything. They would rather not know.

Spike was back. Which she didn't care about. Because who cared that where that vampiric parasite was as long as she wasn't tripping over him ever other step. But he looked so haunted now, so lost, so tortured by his newfound vestiges of humanity. She had seen the look on his face a countless times before, had started each morning by trying not to see it in her own mirror. No, she wasn't going to feel sorry for him, wasn't going to feel anything. He fucked Anya on a table with a video camera rolling the whole time. He tried to rape her. He left her. He left. Shit, and which of those was she thinking was the worse crime, which of those was the unforgiveable sin that made her leave him when he was hurting, when he was looking as lost as she had ever seen him? She wished she knew why she had left, wished she could curse him out with composure, with confidence about why exactly she was doing anything. She couldn't get that look on his face out of her mind. He had looked better after Dru left. He looked better lying drunk on the floor. He looked better after she beat him, till her fingers were bloody and swollen, till his face was lost in pain. At least then he had seemed sure of her feelings, confident of where they stood in relation to each other.

But this... what was she supposed to be doing about this? Hadn't Spike ever heard that old story about sleeping in the bed you made? So he had gone to the demon to get his artificial humanity ripped out by its wires and instead wound up with something more permanent than he could have hoped for. Big deal. Hello, Spike's problem. And he had the nerve to think she could love him, that she would care at all about what happened to him. If she was glad at all to see him back, it was just because she always figured she would be the one to take him down.

What, like you killed him after he slept with Anya? No, wait he's still standing.

Or maybe the way you killed him after he attacked you in the bathroom? She wouldn't even let Xander kill him after that. How was that for a strange possession? Spike was hers to destroy and no one else's.

The same kind of a death you gave him after his one millionth and a half scheme to take over Sunnydale and destroy you? The plans he always walked away from, no matter how magnificently they failed.

Stop lying to yourself, Buffy. This is the vampire who showed up at your house carrying a shotgun once and the only thing you did was make room for him on the back step. And now is when you're going to kill him? You and what spine? Everybody needs a nemesis.

The voices in her head were making some kind of appalling sense, and what was worse, they wouldn't shut up. She wanted him dead, didn't she? She wanted him dust under her nails, an unpleasant memory, a lesson for future slayers that Giles could write down in those diaries he had kept about her for so long. Of course, that would assume that she could afford the transatlantic phone call it would take to tell him. She had a family to feed, a heartbroken Willow to nurse back to some semblance of humanity. Like she wanted to teach anybody else to be human.

Teach to be human? Where the hell had that come from? Spike sure wasn't going to be getting any lessons on humanity from her. She figured that soul or no soul he was still Spike. Only now he was a pissed off Spike, tortured by his very existence. It wasn't like having a soul instantly made him a good person. What was a soul? Serial killers had them.

But she had lost her biggest argument with Spike's newly human eyes, with the pain that coated him like tattoos, skin deep suddenly becoming surprisingly permanent. How many times had she told him she could never love him because he had no soul, could never truly feel anything for him because he had no humanity in common with her?

Panting, exhausted, she leaned against a storefront wall, felt the brick of the building solid behind her, the only real thing in her world right now. Everything else was still spinning, still lost in the hurricane that was Spike.

If she didn't care, why was still thinking about it? If she didn't feel something, anything for him, how could she still be so angry? And worst of all, most impossible to ignore no matter how much she wanted to, was some horrible, niggling feeling like she owed him. In all those dark days after she came back, it had only been Spike that understood what she was going through. It was only Spike that she could tell the truth to. Who was he going to tell the truth to, now that he had, in some strange way, been brought back to the man that he was? Clem? That was a laugh.

She hated him. Hated him with a passion. Couldn't stand the bloodsucker. He needed to be pushed off of her the last time he tried to touch her. He slept with other women. He beat her, stalked her, insulted her. Told her he loved her when Riley showed up with his perfect wife, his perfect life. Asked how she was after the social worker told her that she would lose Dawn. Bandaged her hands after she scraped them bloody crawling out of her own coffin. Told her he would keep her little sister safe until the end of the world. Risked his own life to keep the people she loved safe.

She didn't know how she got back to the crypt, didn't remember any of the walk through the heart of the town that was her own little gateway to hell, the cork on a bottle of apocalypse. One minute she was leaning against a wall on Main Street, cursing the poor suffering woman who had ever given birth to Spike, and in a blink, she was standing outside his door, wondering how she wound up in the last place on Earth she wanted to be. It was in every muscle of her body to turn and go, to leave this stupid place, with the cocky bastard trapped by daytime inside, and never come back, when the door swung open.

Spike stayed in the shadows, lost in the blackness and the sudden contrast between noon and midnight, but his voice was still clear enough. "Still a vampire, sweets. And that means I always know when you're near."

To Be Continued...


	3. Empty Ache Alone

Shade: Empty Ache Alone

_I wish I had a reason  
My flaws are open season  
For this I gave up trying  
One good turn deserves my dying_

"I was just leaving."

"Newsflash, pet; you left half an hour ago. What you're doing now, that's called coming back."

"I didn't mean to come here."

"I think you did. Maybe not your head, but you're body knew what it was doing. Miss me much?" Cocky bastard. Even looking closer to death than she had ever seen him, even with ghosts in his eyes, he still managed to sound so damn sure of himself that she wanted to throw something at him. Like a sharp, pointy stake. Bet he wouldn't be expecting that. But she had never been any good at killing him, no matter how she excelled at hurting him.

"Like I would miss gangrene. I'm going."

She turned her back to him but her body felt like it mired in quicksand, some kind of morass of thought and memory that sucked her down, sucked her, until she felt like she couldn't even breath. Spike was nothing to her, a way to pass the time, a way to feel better, to comfort herself in the dark. He was never real to her, she never wanted him to be. He had been there to take the emptiness away, that was all. Nothing else. What else could he be something to use? She could never love him; she could never feel anything for him but disgust. Her mind rejected the very thought of the two of them together, she couldn't believe the things that she had done when she was with him, and what's more, she couldn't believe that she had liked any of them. That she had done them to him too, and had been filled with a strange sense of perverse joy that she could reduce a creature like him to a dog panting at her feet. And yet, standing here, pretending to leave, she was instead listening to his screamed-raw voice, rusty with old pain, raspy with old desire. She remembered what it had been like to be with him and forget everything else. Sometimes, she had just needed to forget. She had needed something to take her beyond herself, something to make her real life, complete with all the nightmares of adulthood she had never really thought about because deep in her heart she had never imagined that she would live this long, vanish into a haze. Forgetfulness was like a drug, Spike was absinthe to her, bitter poison, sweetened with sugar, addictive delusions; who needed visions when all he made her see was stars?

Shit. She was doing it again. Over. It was over. She was stupid to have let it begun, stupid to have not stopped him in his tracks months ago, years ago. Beyond stupid to have let it go as far as it had. She should have killed him the very first time she ever saw him. But no, instead she let him into her life, more and more with each passing day. It's said that familiarity breeds contempt, but that wasn't quite the right word to describe what she felt for Spike. The more she knew him, the farther inside him the monster faded, so that now sometimes she would look at him and almost be confused, that was how convincing his little skin mask of humanity was. Because she had forgotten hating him, forgotten wanting to kill him, and instead wound up just wanting him. Even when it meant that she couldn't look at herself in the mirror anymore, so ashamed was she at the things she let him do, at the things she did to him. Even that hadn't stopped the need for him that crawled up her bones, moved like blood through her veins, a constant torment. If he didn't mean anything to her, why did it hurt so much when she saw the other woman he was with? Why had that nameless, faceless skank at the wedding hurt, why had Anya hurt?

"You're still standing there, Buffy. C'mon, come in. The sun's hot, you'll burn."

He was trying for casual, for some old hint of the ways things used to be, only his memory was lousy because nice was one thing they had never really managed to pull off. Nice was simple, nice was easy, and nothing between them could have ever been described with either of those two words. No, there wasn't a single memory of Spike she had that wasn't tinged blood red with the memory of some pain or another, the muscle memory of fists on flesh, the bitter taste of copper in the blood, sharp and metallic. She wished she didn't know what blood tasted like. She really wished she didn't know what his blood tasted like.

You'll burn. How's that for irony? There were so many, many ways she could burn and none of them sounded appealing. She was starting to prefer the cold- it was safer by far. She had burned when he had touched her, had turned to ash when he left, lost and alone without an enemy to define her. How had it come to this, that she only felt whole when she knew who she was fighting? Fighting Willow hadn't been the same, it hurt too much, and it scared her down to her bones, because part of it hadn't hurt at all, part of it had been fun, because Willow was strong, so strong. She was worth the fight, worthy of it. And Buffy blamed Spike for that, too, like she blamed him for everything else, because if he hadn't left, she wouldn't have needed an enemy so badly, wouldn't have been so lost that she could turn on Willow so easily.

"I hate you," she muttered, turning back to look into the darkness of the crypt, where pale Spike looked like nothing so much as a ghost of himself, so white in the darkness, the bruises on him black like decay. What had happened to him? She knew from memory exactly how hard it was to leave marks that lasted on him.

"Yeah, I can tell. C'mon it. It's no fun fighting where I can't hit you. Don't fancy turning into a charcoal briquette."

"Oh, c'mon Spikey, it's barbeque season after all." But her feet were walking her back into the crypt no matter what her mind wanted and she knew that once again she was losing to him. He may have been the one always crawling away from their fights with his tail between his legs, but when it came to staying away, neither of them won. When did she start craving him so much, that she would act against her own best interest?

He looked at her long and hard as she walked through the door, his old look, the one that didn't leave room for anything else in his gaze. She had to admire his single-mindedness. Once he gave his attention to something, he gave all of it. It sent a chill down her spine, the way he looked at her. It was almost impossible to look away from the compulsion in his eyes, and what was worse, she knew it wasn't the vampire in him that she responded to, but the man.

He swung the door shut behind him, trapping them both in the midnight dark of his crypt, eternal night, death's best's friend.

Wordless, deadly grace still despite the severity of his injuries, he dropped into a nearby chair, his eyes still on her, his attention still focused on the lines of her face, the strength in her body that always felt like weakness when she was with him.

She stalked over to another chair, could feel the anger inside her shimmer on her skin as she thought about the fact that she had come back again when all she thought she wanted was to be rid of him once and for all.

Silence wrapped around them like spider webs as they sat and stared at each, memories between them. Pain and pleasure and a thousand other shades of feeling hummed in the air between them, made it thick and heavy, almost impossible to breath. One of them had to end the quiet, or she would wind up doing something stupid. Would wind up hurting him again she that she could kiss it better, or worse, depending what he begged for when he was in her arms. What he demanded. What she had given him so easily before.

"What did it?" she finally asked, anything to break the voiceless tension that was strung between them so tightly. "You've been bitching about the chip for years but it seems like you knew just who to ask to try to get it out, so why now?" It wasn't that she cared. It wasn't that she had any interest in the choices that he made. It was only that she hated the silence.

He looked away for the first time since she had come back, something like shame moving in his face, rippling under the surface of his skin. "Cause of what I did to you," he mumbled. "Cause of that last day."

She couldn't keep back a bark of disbelieving laughter. "Yeah, right, I'm supposed to believe that you felt so bad about trying to rape me that you decided it would be great to go back to being able to kill people again? There's a logical chain of events. Not."

"Actually, pet you hit the nail on the head, pet," he responded bitterly. "I felt like shit, and feeling like shit was driving me nuts. Loving you was driving me nuts. I'm a vampire, I'm evil; I'm darkness incarnate. I'm not supposed to regret anything. I'm not supposed to feel ashamed of myself. I hate what you've made me, I hate it with every cell in my dead body, and I knew if I could just get that damn chip ripped out I could back to what I was. I could back to being the big bad, not this sniffling nancyboy that you've made me into!" His voice rose with every word, until he was shouting, not seeming to care that it made his voice sound worse and worse, was no doubt ripping the hell out of his throat.

"I didn't make you into anything! Like I wanted my own personal stalker! Like I ever wanted you at all!"

Well, that made him look back at her. She could see disgust written plainly on his face. "You are such a bloody liar, kind of crap is that, 'I never wanted you, Spike! Go away, Spike!'" he mimicked in a high-pitched voice. "You couldn't stay away from me and you know it. You couldn't stay away from me when we were just talking and you really couldn't stay away when you were fucking me. Bitch. Dru might have been nuts, and Harm was a simpleton, but neither of them was liar. Stop feeling so high and mighty. You liked everything we did together. You liked it when it felt good and you liked it more when it hurt."

"I didn't make you into anything," she repeated stubbornly. "I never asked for you to love me. And I sure as hell didn't tell you to run off right before everything went to hell and get your stupid soul back."

"That one's not strictly true either and you know it as well as I do. You always said you could never love me because I was a thing, a monster."

"Yeah, well, Spike, I never wanted to love you and I really didn't want you to go and screw everything up. Besides, you said it yourself, you didn't do this to get your soul back so I could love you. You did this to get the chip out so you could go back to being a heartless killer. Not my fault that fate stabbed you in the back."

"And yet, here you are. Just like always. Why'd you come back? Could have just left me. Sort of suits that little streak of cruelty that you work so hard to keep anybody from seeing, if you just left me here to rot."

"Yeah, well, see if I'll stay!" she snapped back, and shot to her feet, every intention of walking right out that damn door and leaving him here. So what if he looked like he'd been through a thousand different tortures, so what if she owed him for being the only thing that kept her sane after she realized she wasn't going back to heaven any time soon. He was still Spike, still king of the jerks, and he didn't deserve one minute of her time, or any drop of her concern.

Just as she was wrenching the heavy stone door open, he was on her, one hand wrapped like steel around her arm, holding her in place. "I don't think so, pet," he growled softly. "You came back and I'm not really feeling inclined to let you go."

_You don't need to bother  
I don't need to need to be  
I'll keep slipping farther  
Once I hold on  
I won't let go till it bleeds_

To Be Continued...


	4. On the Problems of Returning to Your Own...

Shade: On the Problems of Returning to Your Own Kind

_Wish I died  
Instead of lived  
A zombie hides my face  
Self forgotten with its memories  
Diaries left with cryptic entries_

She wrenched her arm away from is grasp and winced a bit at how much it hurt to break his grip. "Why do you always have to do this, Spike? It's over; don't you understand over? It's finished between us, it never should have started."

Shoving the door closed again, he leaned with his back against it, looking arrogant despite the rents in his flesh, despite the dried blood and the bruises. That was Spike for you; he could really take a beating and wear it well. She remembered how he looked after she had beaten him, remembered that he still smiled even after she had pummeled him into the ground, remembered that he forgave her even before she had finished pounding in him. That was what had scared her worst of all, that he forgave her. What kind of sick, twisted affection did he feel for her that he took so much pleasure from the pain she inflicted? What was wrong with him that he thought that love was supposed to be like this? That it was supposed to hurt this badly? That anything that they did together was okay, that loving people meant you made them bleed? In the end, that was why she ran. Because it was so easy to hurt him, because he liked it so much that she was scared, truly scared, that she would start to like it, too. Would start to think that this was supposed to be how she should treat the men she was sleeping with.

Oh, hell, what is wrong with me, she thought, and it was so painful, so awful, that she just wanted to sit down on the floor, close her eyes and pretend that none of this was happening. Not one little bit of it. She wanted to picture herself back in the grave, peaceful and dead, without a care in the world.

"You didn't do it for me. You did it for yourself and it screwed you over and I'm glad," she spit out and could feel the old familiar venom of their love to hate each other relationship rising up in her again, a warped and disturbed need to hurt him for loving her.

"Hurts all the time," he said, in an almost conversational manner, like it was the easiest thing in the world to talk about, but she could hear the anger and regret lacing through his words. "Starting to get why my poof of a sire turned into such a broody git. It's not even the things that I did so much as how happy it made me. How much I loved it. And I hate that I still want to go back to my old ways. I never wanted to be this. I loved being a vampire. And not just any vampire, I loved being Spike, William the Bloody, the big bad, the vamp who killed two Slayers. But now this; I get this double whammy, the chip and a soul and its like I can't even feel myself anymore. Like I can't reach myself. Feel all lost."

She looked away from the raw confession. She couldn't stand this. She had loved Angel, Angel, and Spike could never be him, not even with a soul, not even with that devil-may-glare glint in his eye looking old and faded now. This didn't change anything. He was a killer and the person he had made her into through his love, through his tender care that left bruises on her body and a sick feeling under her skin was not the kind of person she could bring herself to look at in the morning. And yet all his words sounded so much like how she had felt just months ago, crawling out of the her dark box, her hands bleeding, her clothes dirty and cold on her back from the funeral slit, to see Sunnydale on fire, to see it look like hell on Earth, and realize that she was back, that she had left perfection and come back to this, to pain, mortality, all the things she thought she had left behind her like so much old skin. There was no feeling in her then either, nothing true, just an leprous despair that ate at everything in her until she was desperate to feel anything again, for any brief flash of the person she used to be. Spike felt it too, now, she could tell. He had lost the pleasure of his old ways, lost anything that brought him happiness, was now doubly trapped by nature and nurture, forced by powers stronger than himself into some new shape that he didn't fit at all. She had kissed him that first time, and all the times after that, because she was desperate to feel anything at all, dying for any brief spark of humanity to remind of her of what she had been. She couldn't imagine what Spike was looking for now. A spark of the demonic? Something he could kill, rend and tear without any regret in the morning, without any feeling at all? Something he could lose all this new pain in, all the sharp edges of living in a world where nothing was right anymore?

"I can't help you," she said wearily. "What could I do, Spike? I could barely help myself when I came back, what can I possibly do for you? I don't... what am I supposed to do? Comfort you, try to take the awful of burden of humanity off your shoulders? You're a monster. You'll always be a monster, with or without a soul."

He grabbed her arms them, again, grabbed her and dragged her against him, and it was like the last time and the first time and she wanted to fight and she wanted to struggle because she never wanted to want him again. She never wanted to need him again. She didn't want to go back to the way things were ever again.

But his eyes were intent on her, fixed, burning with an emotion she couldn't even identify. "Can't you just once look at me and see that I've bloody well changed? It's not even this hell damned soul the demon set me up with. It's you! It's always been you and if you think you aren't excited about that, how the hell do you think it makes me feel?"

"You're nothing to me," she whispered back, wanting to yell, wanting to scream, wanting to destroy him so badly it was like an itching in her bones, and craving in her muscles. But like all the other times between them, like every fight that started out violent and turned, well, different, if no less violent, she feel a deeper need crawl through her and the shuddered at its touch.

She tried not to think that it was her fault that she wound up kissing him again, just for the thrill of his mouth, bruised and bloody, cold against her own. It wasn't that she missed this, it wasn't that she missed him. She just wanted him to shut up. At least that was what she told herself for as long as she could think straight and then Spike's hands went to all the places he knew she liked and she wasn't thinking at all anymore.

_You don't need to bother  
I don't need to need to be  
I'll keep slipping farther  
Once I hold on  
I won't let go till it bleeds  
_  
To Be Continued...


	5. My Disease

Shade: My Disease

_You don't need to bother  
I don't need to need to be  
Yeah, I don't need to be  
I'll keep slipping farther  
Once I hold on  
Yeah, once I hold on  
I'll never return my disease._

When she could think again, instead of just feel, they were lying on the floor, their favorite spot because even when they lost themselves inside each other's bodies, they could never seem to want anything kind or gentle, and the crypt floor, hard, stone, cold, unforgiving, was the cruelest thing they could do to their bodies. Once they were done, once her breathing had calmed and her heart had stilled, she pulled away from him, just like she always had, no cuddling or gentle talk for them, and lay back, pillow her head on her arm inside of the brutal stones. He rested on his side, his eyes on her face like he couldn't look away. She hadn't tried to miss any of the bruises or rips in his body and now she couldn't even bring herself to look at his body closely, because she could feel fresh, cold blood on her finger tips and taste it in her mouth and she knew that she had opened healing wounds, maybe even caused some new ones. What was it about them, that she could never be gentle? She had been gentle with her other lovers, had never felt the slightest desire to hurt them, bit them, draw their blood to the surface while they screamed her name in pain, in pleasure. But with Spike, she could feel all her control slip, ever bit of mastery over her strength that she had learned over the years slipped away like it never was and here was the result, Spike bleeding at her side and loving her for it. And again, she felt sick, felt appalled at the creature she had become with him. She came back wrong, he said, but that wasn't true. Tara had told her it wasn't true, and that meant that deep down inside, Buffy had never been right. She had always been wrong, somehow, deep inside her skin, and it had taken Spike, twisted, masochistic, brutal in his desire and fierce in his love, to call the monsters out of her blood, her bone, her muscle. She wanted to be human, had always wanted a life separate from being the Slayer, but with Spike, she was only a killer, only a hunter, the human side lost, dissolving in his touch. He thought he had control over her, when she had kept them secret, thought he had something to hold over her head. The truth was that neither of them had control over her. With him, she was different, alien, more supernatural than natural and the reality was that neither of them could control the force of her once they set it free. It was the worst kind of hubris, for him to think he could control any part of this. She didn't know why he couldn't see that, didn't know why he kept coming back for more. And, more awful yet, she didn't know why she kept giving in to him, kept giving him everything he wanted, the pain, the sex, the blood.

"Why don't you hate me?" she asked at last, her voice tired from fighting him, exhausted from the battle of keeping him at bay. "You're supposed to hate me, that's what vampires do, they hate me."

"Not all of us, love," he answered easily. "I'm not the first, and I'm not the last. We're immortal, or the next best thing to it. You really that surprised that we would fall in love with death when we saw it, all beautiful and blond, walking towards us with a glint in its eye? Hate and love are the same, the twin passions that rule humanity, even those members that have fallen somewhat over the years."

"Now you really sound like Angel. Or Angelus." But wasn't she thinking just the same thing before he came back?

"Fucking soul. Makes me think too much."

She strove to regain some composure, and with it, her edge. "I didn't know you thought at all."

But he didn't react to the barb, didn't even blink. He answered casually, like she hadn't just insulted, like he didn't care what she said or did as long as she stayed. Sick bastard. "Of you. Constantly. Even when I wanted to kill you. That's my nature. When I find something I want, I don't stop wanting till I have it."

"But you've had it now. You've had me. More times than I can count and in more ways than I thought possible. This little obsession of yours should be over by now."

He rolled her over to face him, held her face so she couldn't look away, and she winced at what she saw. His mouth was bleeding again, and she could see her own teeth marks in his lips. When had she become this, when had she given up her humanity to him? She wanted to apologize and hated herself even more for thinking that. What did she care if she hurt him? He was a monster, a killer. He deserved to be hurt. He deserved the pain, the blood. His eyes were steady on her, despite the bruising around them. His mouth was a straight line, no trademark smirk for her. She hated when he decided to be serious. Whatever she wanted out of him that she seemed so addicted to, it was not seriousness. It was not thought, or words. It was action, it was flesh, it was passion. It didn't involve little heart to heart sessions afterwards. "You haven't been listening, Buffy. Sure, I wanted your body. Who the hell wouldn't, all that strength wrapped in a deceptively frail looking package, all that destruction hiding under your skin? But what I really wanted, what I'm not going to give up on until I get it, is your love. I want you to admit that this isn't just physical between us. I want you forever, I've given up everything for you, every damn thing that ever mattered to me, and I'm not going anywhere until I get you."

"And if you do? What then, Spike? You leave? Like everyone leaves? Because loving me apparently isn't fun unless you can hurt me?" Oh shit. Had she said that? Out loud? Where had that come from? But in her mid, she could still see Angel walking away, Angel taking the easy way out, instead of staying and trying to love her despite all the obstacles. And she saw Parker not calling, explaining in that all too bland voice that sure they had had fun, did she really want anything more? She could see Riley, that skanky vamp-tramp on her knees before him, her fangs in him, writhing from the pleasure of the feed, could see him explaining that no, he really couldn't tell she gave a damn, could see him getting in the helicopter and leaving her, not coming back until he had a pretty fresh faced wife, some normal human for him to have a normal human life with. Spike was the only one who kept coming back, who came back despite everything.

To her horror, she realized that she was starting to come to depend on that, starting to need that. And that scared her more than anything else she had ever done or felt for him. Fighting the urge to gag, she was up with realizing it, grabbing her clothes, grabbing her life with both hands like there was some way that she could still salvage everything, anything. Through it all, Spike lay on the floor, watching her with knowing eyes. He could tell she was running, just like she always ran from him, and he wasn't stopping her. And even as she bolted from the crypt into the twilight of fresh night outside, appalled at how long she had spent in his arms, in his world, he knew he wasn't chasing her now because he understood that she would be back. That she had no one to go back to but him. And that realization, that horrible epiphany, was enough to make her run even faster.

To Be Continued...


	6. Endgame: The Final Moves of the Match

Shade: Endgame: The Last Moves of the Match

Lyrics from "69 Love Songs, Volume I" by Magnetic Fields

_The book of love is long and boring  
No one can lift the damn thing.  
It's full of charts and facts and figures  
And instructions for dancing..._

_But I, I love it when you read to me  
And you, you can read me anything._

It was twilight when he came to the house, and it had been so long that she was actually surprised to see him there. God knew where she thought that he might go; Spike had always been as hopelessly trapped by Sunnydale as she herself had been. The idea of leaving, running from this place where demons sought her out on a daily basis, making her some sort of unholy grail in the demons dimensions. Buffy couldn't imagine what it was here keeping him there. Certainly no other man- demon, undead, whatever- had thought she was worth that kind of trouble or attention. With an annoyed sigh, she turned her back to him, trying to get as engrossed as possible by watering the lawn, which had been looking really ratty lately.

"I know you saw me"

.

For someone who thinks he's so smart, you think you'd be able to take a hint better. She still didn't turn around. She didn't want to focus on Spike, didn't want to see if the bruises and cuts had healed yet, didn't want to know if he was wearing his new soul well. She just wanted her lawn green again. She was becoming a regular Californian housewife, if she did say so herself. Well, okay, minus the husband, the decent job, and kid that was hers as opposed to a sister made out of a glowing ball of energy. She liked taking care of the lawn, though she'd be lying to herself if she didn't admit that part of it was just getting out of the house, and doing something simple and straightforward.

She could hear Spike shifting behind her, trying to deal with the fact that she was ignoring him. She didn't think that he'd be able to take it for long. He was nothing without the mirror of people around him, reflecting his presence in a thousand small actions. She figured she was no better than any of the other people who had stared in the past, fascinated by his snake-like charm, deadly yet smooth, like scales sliding over the skin.

She tried not to think about what it had felt like to have Spike sliding over her skin. She needed to end that part of her life, she needed to find something healthier, something human. So what if nothing was presenting itself- himself, she meant himself- to her. There had to be somebody out there. So what if, when possibilities did present themselves, they bored her with their humanity, their innocence of the darkness. What was she supposed to say, when they asked why she looked like she had just been in a fight, or where the blood came from?

"Oh, for god's sake, the bloody lawn is well wet already. Turn the sodding thing off already, will you?"

"You're still here?" But she couldn't quite stop herself from turning to hose off and facing him. Even in the shadows of the impending night, she could see he was looking better. Healed. There was just the smallest of cuts on his lip to remind her of what he looked like the last time she saw him. He stared at her silent, almost sullen, but if she looked at him just right, she could see some emotion in his eyes. His arms were at his side, an apparently forgotten bunch of bruised and beaten looking daisies hanging forlornly from his left hand. "Those for me?"

He looked vaguely surprised by the question and glanced at the dying bouquet. "No, they're for the garbage man. Thought I'd try to convince him to come by the crypt sometime."

"Charming as ever, I see. I see having a soul hasn't changed what really makes you you."

"Didn't your mum ever tell you not to wait on a man to change?"

"Didn't you spend something like six months straight telling me you'd changed?"

"Yeah, love, but not cause you expected me too."

Buffy drifted listlessly over to the porch and set down on the steps. She didn't want to admit to herself that she missed him, his snide sense of humor and the way he always had a wisecrack ready. The way he looked standing in the moonlight, his body glowing ghost like in the night, he was so pale. "Why are you here, Spike?" Three guesses. Why was he ever here? She was running out of the strength to so no. Each time she said it, she meant it less and less. And her excuses were getting flimsier and flimsier as time wore on.

She wasn't surprised when he sat down next to her on the stoop, the flowers still dangling loosely in his grip.

When he spoke, he sound disgusted with himself. "Missed you. Only so long a bloke can go without being insulted, beat on and rejected before he gets to missing it."

She slid her eyes over to him, although she was careful to keep her body still. He knew too much about her without her giving him any huge, impossible to miss clues such as looking directly at him after he spoke.

When the silence had finally gotten too heavy to be ignored, she finally said, in the closest she figured would ever come to an apology. "I've been a bitch."

He was sitting close enough to feel his body move when he shrugged. "No worries, pet; that's probably what attracted me to you in the first place. It's not like I'm a bleeding Prince Charming."

"What the hell do you see in me anyway?"

"Christ, Buffy, what's with the constant scrutiny from women in this century? When I first noticed the fairer sex, a girl barely looked at you straight on and now it's all, 'I think we should talk.' Not an improvement, if you ask me. Who the hell cares why I love you? If I came up with the right flowery speech, would it actually make you feel the same way? I could say you make me feel alive, I could agree with you that I'm in love with pain, I can act like that fool Angel and say you're my redemption. It's just words. You feel something or you don't and all the pretty speeches in the world won't change that. I love you. You can figure that makes me a better person, or sick, or a liar but how you feel about the issue won't make me wake up some morning and not love you."

She thought of all the running she had done since coming back from the dead. Most of it had either been to Spike or from him. Most vivid in her mind was the memory of running to the Magick Box, after seeing him and Anya together, of how bad it hurt and of the way she wouldn't let Xander kill the vampire, even when she couldn't remember ever feeling so betrayed. She remembered the fear, the anger, the disgust, when he tried to force himself on her, and the confused shame on his face, the war in his eyes between the monster he had been for centuries and the man he had been trying to show her he could be. She remembered showing up in the crypt, counting on him to protect Dawn, even after everything that had wrong between them, and the shock she felt when Clem said he was gone.

With that thought top in her mind, she whispered the last words out loud, "...You were gone."

"Back now. You gonna hold that over my head forever? Told you why I left."

"You... tried to..." she couldn't finish the sentence, but he knew her well enough to know where it was going.

"Yeah, and I've never felt worse about anything in my whole undead life. I've slaughtered thousands, worshiped darkness, killed kiddies for fun, and I think that's the only thing I've ever done that I regret. I didn't change for you, Slayer, but I've changed anyway. Because of you. Cause of the way you make me feel. Can't a vamp get a second chance with you? Angel almost sent the whole world to hell, and you took him back."

He had listened. From before her ascension to heaven, to after her brutal return to the Earth, it was Spike who had been there for her. When everyone else had been too scared to say anything about her death, more than willing to pretend she had been asleep in bed and not six feet under, it was Spike who sought her out to see if she needed anything. It was Spike that made her feel alive, first her body, and then, more reluctantly, her own soul. If she didn't care at all, he wouldn't possess such a nearly effortless ability to hurt her. If she didn't care at all, her heart wouldn't have leapt to see him standing this night in the long shadows of the garden.

"I can't take the secrecy." It had felt like a cancer eating at her heart, last time, lying to her friends, the shame of knowing how they would look down on her if they knew.

"Wasn't too fond of it myself, either. Shout it from the rooftops. I'm not shy."

And wasn't that the truth? Spike had always swaggered through his unlife, supremely confident that if things didn't go his way the first time, he could beat things into submission and make it work the second. But the lies hadn't been the only problem weighing them down the last time either.

"I don't know if I can love you, Spike."

He stilled, going so perfectly stiff that even the faint illusion of life left him. After a long moment, he spoke again. "Does you saying that mean you're willing to try?"

"You gotta stop all this, 'you belong in the darkness,' crap. I belong wherever I happen to be."

"Fair enough, so long as you don't expect me to become all knight in shining armor like, a hero for the poor folks of Sunnydale. I'm still a vamp. I'll burn to ash if you try to drag me out in to the sun."

Buffy stared at the rich purple sky, the moon rising slowly, and the first stars faint in the distance. She looked around in the deepening gloom, the shadows that seemed to hang in the very air. "I like the twilight. And the shade."

She felt a cold hand wrap around her warm one. "I can do the shade."

The End


End file.
